Wireless communication has experienced explosive growth in recent years. As consumers and businesses rely more on their wireless devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless service providers, i.e., carriers, strive to provide additional functionality on these wireless devices. This additional functionality would not only increase the demand for wireless devices but also increase the usage among current users. Increasing functionality, specifically by increasing the applications accessible by the wireless device, however, is costly and complicated thereby discouraging carriers from providing this functionality.
Furthermore, there is little to no assurance that an application, once placed on a wireless device, will execute properly. Currently, reliance on the application's ability to execute on a wireless device rest on the developer, the wireless device maker and/or the carrier. As more applications are developed and the number of applications on a wireless device increases, the wireless device environment becomes more dynamic. For example, a wireless device may choose to retrieve or execute a number of different applications from large pool of available applications at any given time. Thus, ensuring that any given application will be distributed to the wireless device and execute safely becomes much more difficult to control.
This is of particular concern because improper execution of an application may not only detrimentally affect the wireless device, it may also be harmful to the carrier network and other network components, including other wireless devices. For example, one application, if not restricted, could take control of a wireless device's power control and cause interference among other wireless devices and decrease the overall capacity in the cell servicing the wireless device.
Currently, neither wireless device manufacturers nor carriers are equipped to handle the testing and safe distribution of applications in a dynamic application distribution and execution environment. Thus, there is a concern that applications will be distributed and executed on wireless devices that may cause harm to the wireless device, network or other wireless devices on the network.
In addition, other safety issues arise as more applications are developed and the environment by which applications are transmitted to a wireless device becomes more dynamic. As the number of applications and the number of developers creating these applications increases, the desire to know the source of any given application, i.e., the developer, also increases. A carrier or a handset manufacturer will want to know, with some degree of reliability, that they can determine the source of an application.
Consequently, what is needed in the art is a system and method for providing a safer environment for the distribution and execution of applications on a wireless device.